If you ever want to consider drawing your own texture for the game then this information here will be quite useful! Download can be found at the end of this post.

Normal textures

These are triangles within a 32 x 31 sized rectangle. The two triangle textures overlap each other. This gives some additional challenge for drawing a seamless texture, because repeating parts will be also within the triangle and not just in the outer edges.

Also normal textures have their minimap color ripped directly from the texture from position 16 x 0.

Water and lava

Water and lava textures are quite simple in that they are two triangles stacked on top of each other. Each triangle fits within a 53 x 27 rectangle. A more challenging thing to understand is that the textures are rendered 135 degrees clockwise (so that the “water” text in the debug texture above appears horizontally in the game).

Roads

Regular roads, gravel / donkey roads, waterways and mountain roads consist of two parts: the main road part and a node part that is drawn to the ends of a road.

The odd part about these graphics is that they are inverted vertically. In addition to this the node part is rotated 90 degrees clockwise after being inverted so that the dashed line will points upwards.

Another thing to note about roads is that they are drawn at roughly half the resolution. Each pixel does get used at some point though depending on slopes, height etc.

Edges

These triangles are drawn to the edges seamlessly so that if you have a lone triangle texture the visual end result would be a hegaxon if the edges would be of a fully solid color.

Also note that all the debug textures use the same color that is in the edges.

Unused lava textures

These were once part of the game but were removed before release, however they do remain usable. They are drawn exactly as you can see them, which makes them somewhat more convenient. The sad part about these textures is that their edge is desert so when they are against each other a desert edge is drawn.

As these triangles are quite small they appear quite low resolution in the game, which is also a bit nasty.

Solid color texture

There is a lone pixel at the bottom left corner in position 0 x 254. This will result in a solid single color texture with no shading and no edges.

Other things to note

Magenta pixels around the textures are never drawn. If you use this debug texture and see magenta somewhere then please report it to me so I can adjust and fix the debug texture file!

I drew a dotted line near each road texture. I think this is the point where going much further makes the edge look a bit “off”. At least if you attempt to make a smooth transition.

You can see a single pixel extending off water and lava textures. It is actually a lone pixel that can get drawn outside of the triangle area probably due to a small calculation error within the game.

Download

I just wanted to know which parts of textures are actually drawn by the game. So it uses two simple triangles and both triangles use the same texture. On flat surface the triangle is within roughly a 31 x 30 rectangle, but it can stretch by one additional pixel to both directions to 32 x 31 when drawing slopes.

The image below is most helpful when looking at it with some additional zoom. Things to note:

Barely any water pixels are drawn; the ones that are drawn are leaked from the right side of the texture

Most of yellow comes from the right side of the triangles, barely any from left side

Top right magenta pixel makes an appearance

Top right green pixel below magenta doesn’t

Magenta midpoint pixels don’t make an appearance

Green pixel above right one does; the one below doesn’t

This is only interesting if making texture mods or adjusting RttR rendering, but at least it has now been researched and somewhat documented 🙂

Dot Age (.Age) is a village simulator that combines itself with a roguelike. It doesn’t really look or feel like a Settlers game, but it has some similarities:

You build things

You gather resources

People do their things

Everything else is quite different. Dot Age is turn based and does not have a competing player. Your enemy is the nature: diseases and events will throw the challenge at you. Also, it is a bit funny when you game over to mass diarrhea.

A few of Dot Age’s many buildings; you get random ones on each playthrough

Nick Beer has made a nice command line tool for creating your own missions, including simple victory conditions and story. There are still many missing features and it isn’t particularly user friendly as it is now, as you can’t just run it and magic happens, but it is the first tool available in years for making missions that is also free to use! If I recall correctly all the previous tools have been payware and only available in German language.

As a side note: our online Map Generator does not currently support harbor generation. Adding the support is possible, but I’d rather make it “properly” instead of just quickly hacking it in. Doing it well makes it impossible for you to generate harbor maps that aren’t truly playable.

Internet Archive has published quite a few MS-DOS games on their website, ready to be played! Some of the notable titles include Jazz the Jackrabbit, Commander Keen 5, Tyrian and Stunts. Yup, there is no Settlers II, at least not yet.

However since things are looking quite good there is a possibility for the future: it may be possible to generate maps and run an immediate trial of it on demo version of The Settlers II right here on this site! I hope things advance nicely during this year so that DOSBox running in a browser no longer lags too much and won’t cut music as much as it does now. Mouse may also be a bit of an issue right now, at least it didn’t follow my actions properly when I tried to play Triplane Turmoil.

Anyway, great new possibilities are clearly going to happen this year, or soon enough!

You can control the number of soldiers that you have in all of your military buildings. If you don’t have enough soldiers and you set the setting to maximum and then back to minimum the game will keep on moving soldiers back and forth until each building has been visited by the requested number of soldiers. Ie. if you have only one extra soldier it will keep moving back’n’forth between a military building and your Headquarters until it has visited every military building as many times as there are missing slots.

If you pause the game and load a game the pause will remain in effect, except that the game will play. You just can’t control it and the screen is dark. You can do this multiple times until you can’t really make any sense of what you see on the screen.

Sometimes the game allows more soldiers to go into a military building than it has slots for soldiers.

Soldiers can get stuck facing each other when they’ve been on an attack mission.

Fisher and stonemason won’t give a notice that there is no more accessible fish/stone if the site where there still is a resource is blocked by terrain (ie. swamp) or indestructible object (pine tree, or a tree that was falling when woodcutter’s hut was destroyed). FYI: Settlers II.net Map Generator has been written so that these conditions won’t happen!

Have you noticed any interesting bugs? We can’t really get any fixes these anymore, but knowing about these bugs may be nice-to-know information when implementing similar game mechanics in other games (such as Return to the Roots, Widelands and maybe other future projects).

One thing I’ve noticed while playing GoG.com version of the game is that I don’t really have crashes with it. Or maybe the maps generated by Map Generator avoid bugs in the game? I haven’t really played any other maps recently.